http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/long_mondragon.htmlA company
town--Arrasate is the Basque word for Mondragon.By any name --this is a city sprouted up around a
21st century IDEAL.
You can start your MONDRAGON just outside of your
town,
With ENOUGH PEOPLE, some industrial or artistic skills
--

The Mondragon
Co-operative Federation: A Model for our Time?Mike Long Reprinted from
Freedom, Winter 1996

The Mondragon
Co-operative Federation (MCF) is a
community of economically highly successful
worker-owned, worker-controlled production and
consumption co-operatives centered around
Mondragon, a town in the Basque region of
northern Spain, and now spreading throughout the Basque
provinces and beyond. The MCF is an experiment in
participatory economic democracy rooted in a powerful
grassroots movement for Basque cultural revival and
autonomy, but inclusive of non-Basques.

The MCF began quietly on a tiny scale with one co-op and
12 workers nearly 40 years ago under the fascist Franco
dictatorship. The original members were educated but
poor and had to borrow money from sympathetic community
members to get started. By 1994, the MCF had
become the fifteenth biggest business group in Spain,
comprising some 170 co-ops and over 25,000 worker
members and their families, with vast assets, large
financial reserves, and annual sales of around three
billion US dollars.

Studies have shown that the co-ops have consistently outperformed
surrounding capitalist industry on all the usual
measures, and while unemployment in Spain has hovered
around 20% for many years, full employment has been
maintained within the Federation. All this has been
achieved with a level of internal democracy and concern
for social justice undreamt of by most workers
struggling under exploitative state systems, whether
capitalist or authoritarian socialist.

Not surprisingly, international interest in the MCF has
grown over the past 20 years, especially now that so
many governments are unable to provide even for basic
human needs food, shelter, education, healthcare, art
and recreation - and are increasingly recognised
as uninterested in doing so. (As anarchists have long
pointed out, that is not what governments are for, after
all.) There is a sizeable literature in several
languages on Mondragon. Harvard business students study
management within the Mondragon co-ops. Stanford law
students learn about the legal obstacles to setting up
such entities in the USA Enlightened Australian trade
unionists consider whether using union funds to start
"mini-Mondragons" for their unemployed members might be
more effective than filling politicians' pockets in the
vain hope of slowing corporate job export to non-union,
low-wage, third world countries. And some anarchists
wonder if the MCF is a test, or even a vindication, of
their ideas.

This article has three aims. The first is to sketch the
historical context for the MCF, including the wide-scale
experimentation with worker-controlled industry and
agriculture that took place during the early months of
the Spanish Civil War.

There are similarities, ignored by many professional MCF
observers, although not by all, between the internal
structure and day-to-day functioning of the CNT/UGT
collectives in 1936 and 1937 and the MCF co-operatives
since 1956. This is so despite the undeniable
compromises which today's worker-owners have made (or as
most of them see it, have been forced to make) in order
to stay afloat in the hostile capitalist sea in which
they operate, and despite the fact that the debt appears
to go unrecognised by many of the co-operators
themselves, few of whom consider themselves anarchists.
The second aim is to provide a brief overview of the
Federation's development, structure and functioning. The
third is to evaluate its significance for
anarcho-syndicalists.

Industrial unions are not only the means to an end, for
anarcho-syndicalists, however. They also offer a
mechanism for the rational co-ordination of the
production and distribution of goods and services in the
new society on a scale demanded by its modern size and
complexity - a scale that is difficult, perhaps
impossible, for either pure anarcho-communism or
collectivism to manage. To illustrate, union and
industry-wide councils can preempt the potential for
selfish competition inherent (although not inevitable of
course) in collectivism, with its retention of assets
and property ownership by collective members. They can
do this, for example, by sheltering one collectively
owned farm, factory or service from a more successful
one, or by researching planning and funding the initial
implementation of new unionfunded ventures, such as
co-operatives, ensuring that they will be useful,
economically viable, and will not duplicate services
offered elsewhere. Their size and strength also allow
industrial unions to guara ntee protection for sick,
weak or temporarily unproductive community members,
rather than leaving them to depend on what is
essentially the charity of others, as pure collectivism
tends to do. Finally, as evidenced by the historical
record, anarcho-syndicalism has long been recognised as
relevant to their needs by far more than "just"
blue-collar smokestack operators, appealing instead to
workers of all kinds: to sailors, dockers, miners,
lumberjacks, bakers, cobblers, barbers, needleworkers,
educators, postal workers, flight attendants and
computer operators, to white-collar providers of
numerous other goods and services, and to collectivism,
with its retention of millions of landless peasants.

In addition to all these options and variants in
anarchist economics, there are disagreements within the
various camps about how to get from here to there.
Anarchists have long argued over whether, as one
collectivist, Proudhon, believed, it is possible to
evolve gradually and peacefully towards one or the other
system, or whether, as another collectivist, Bakunin,
asserted, what they aspire to can only be achieved by
revolution and expropriation of the existing means of
production, forcibly if necessary. Not surprisingly,
therefore, anarchists' attitudes towards Mondragon vary,
too, ranging from enthusiastic (e.g. Benello, 1986/1992)
to dismissive (e.g. Chomsky, 1994). What follows is
based on my reading of English, and some Spanish,
literature on the MCF, coupled with a week-long visit to
Arrasate (the Basque name for Mondragon) in June, 1994,
with fellow Wobbly, Charlene "Charlie" Sato (we visited
as individuals, not as representatives of any
organisation). Our stay in Arrasate included an
intensive series of pre-arranged interviews, informal
group discussions, and site visits, as well as enjoyable
and equally informative evenings spent socialising with
co-op members over bottles of the MCF's excellent Rioja
wines.

A model for our times?

The generalizability of the Mondragon model may be
considered in at least two ways: in terms of its practical
viability and its ideological acceptability. Much
has been written about the former, with some debate
about the relative contributions to the MCF's economic
success of the following factors, and various
combinations thereof: Basque nationalism; co-operative
values; a strong sense of (Basque or any other) ethnic,
linguistic and cultural identity among the participants;
the foresight and leadership of Father Arizmendiarrieta;
the compatibility of MCF values with Basque traditions,
such as co-operative farming practices and the
relatively equitable land distribution among Basque
families compared, for instance, with the hacienda
system of southern Spain; the rapid expansion of the
Spanish economy after the Civil War, with a heavy demand
for household goods and other early MCF products; the
political and economic history of Spain, with its strong
anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist traditions and lengthy
prior experience with agricultural, fishing, and
industrial production co-ops; Mondragon's strategic
location, with easy access to large ports like Bilbao,
and short distances to major export markets; the scope
and diversity of the MCF's high technology products; the
use of crucial second degree co-ops; early establishment
of the CLP; the centrality of the industrial co-ops; the
relatively low cost of land for the agricultural sector;
the availability of a highly educated work force with
relevant skills; and the felt need to look to a
self-help model, given the Basque people's long history
of state oppression.

Also widely considered crucial is the MCF co-ops'
internal worker-member economic structure. My own view
is that perhaps all, of the above factors were
differentially important at various times in the MCF's
history, it is in their internal structure and
functioning that the co-ops' main ingredient for success
lies - and in this domain, too, that they come closest
to anarchist principles and values. I believe that (a)
the motivation and commitment needed to buy or work
one's way into a co-op; (b) the initial extra
capitalisation provided by retention of a portion of
members' income in their internal capital accounts; (c)
the equality and mutual respect produced by the one
person, one share, one vote, system; and (d) the
stability and freedom from external control guaranteed
by the impossibility of members selling shares to each
other or to outsiders, have made for a system of worker
ownership and (with some dilution in the interests of
operational size and efficiency) worker control. The
pride and security this brings the MCF members, the
feeling of control over their own lives, the visible
economic success of their efforts, the decent standard
of living they have achieved for themselves and their
families, and the positive impact all this has on the
communities to which they return after work each day,
have had a liberating effect on the workers of
Mondragon, just as anarchist theory would predict.

If this analysis is accurate, or even close to it,
variants of the model adapted for local conditions must
be of interest to like-minded individuals or whole
communities elsewhere. In fact, co-ops on something like
the Mondragon model are already operating in several
countries, including Germany and the USA. Many writers
have discussed the MCF or similar projects positively,
and several have provided practical information on how
to go about setting up new co-ops.

Whether worker or union-owned and/or controlled, and no
doubt accompanied by militant union organising in
existing workplaces, it is clear that something like
Mondragon-style co-op federations, and federations of
federations, are urgently needed in many countries
today. Quite apart from the human misery and
environmental devastation it causes, capitalism simply
does not work even judged by its own execrable
standards. The desperate plight of growing millions of
unemployed and never-to-be-employed workers in the inner
city ruins of so many "advanced" industrialised
countries attests to this. So does the poverty, disease
and starvation that is the lot of millions of capitalism's
third world victims. These people are viewed
by "their" governments merely as the inevitable
statistical fall-out from multinational corporate
"restructuring" and increased "efficiency". Politicians,
states and the capitalist system have nothing to offer
them. Radical industrial unions, like the CNT, the SAC
and the IWW have something to offer the lowest tier of
humanity. Ultimately, however, their future lies in
their own hands, just as it did the oppressed citizens
of the small town of Arrasate some fifty years
ago.

Another feature of a
community is the bartering of TIME. What is a time
exchange?

At its most basic
level, a time exchange or time bank is simply about
spending an hour doing something for somebody in your
community. That hour is recorded in the online software
as a time credit. You can then use that time credit, or
HOUR, to use having someone do something for you. This
is not about getting paid for helping your neighbors.
It's about leveling the playing field and enabling
individuals of all ages, life experiences, and income
levels to rediscover their gifts and reinvest themselves
and in their communities. This is about working together
to build a stronger, more united community. So I help
you pick peaches in July, you help me harvest apples in
October. We both make wine when our grapes get sweet,
hopefully yours are different variety than mine, ripen
at a different time. All intensive labor chores, pork
slaughter, sowing...cheese making might occasion work
sharing. Search terms: HOUR FOR HOUR TIME EXCHANGE
BARTER